An indispensable dish in Korea on Seollal (Lunar New Year) is tteokguk (soup with thinly sliced rice cake).
This food reflects the wish of Korea's ancestors to start a new year solemnly and cleanly like the whiteness of the tteok (rice cake) in the soup. To make tteokguk, long garaetteok (cylindrical strands of rice cake) made of white rice are cut into thin coin-shaped pieces, boiled in broth and topped with seasoning and garnish.
An age-old belief in Korea is that a person gets a year older if he or she eats tteokguk on Seollal.
Koreans are widely believed to have first eaten the soup on Seollal in the middle period of the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910), as no records from the early Joseon era mention the food.
This video explains how to make tteokguk to mark the Year of Gyemyo (Black Rabbit) under the Asian zodiac.
